With the advent of office systems and the improvements in computing power and storage, it becomes appropriate to consider various applications which offer the operator the benefit of the system scanning documents to find anomalies and possible errors in the text. It has been posed in the prior art that computer systems review documents and compute a "foggyness factor" for the respective sentences, paragraphs and chapters. This advises the operator on a high level how consistent and in a bulk manner infers how lucid a composition is. Such "foggyness factors" derive their inference based on a correlation against sentence length, number of punctuations, length of words and other superficial factors. The technology does not necessarily say something is wrong, but rather how far from a postulated ideal the author's composition style is.
Another known method for examining text for errors is to scan the document and check each word against a spelling dictionary to detect misspelled words. A technology suitable for miniprocessor implementation and consistent with office system technology is disclosed in the "Digital Reference Matrix For Word Verification", U.S. Pat. No. 3,995,254, issued Nov. 30, 1976 to W. S. Rosenbaum. This technology determines if a word is misspelled but not whether it is misused. No intelligence is exercised about the word, rather only about its character content.
A simple method for examining a document with contextual significance is to examine each word in the document against a dictionary composed of homophones or confusable words. Each time a word in the dictionary is encountered in the document, it is flagged and brought to the operator's attention for manual review, and if necessary, corrective intervention.
However, a major detraction of such content analysis is that for such common homophones or confusable forms as, there/their, fore/four/for, to/too/two, etc. the noise level of successive flagged words, regardless of the obviousness of their correct usage, is more of a nuisance factor than a remedial composition aid. The ability to automatically detect homophones and confusion prone words that appear to be syntactically mismatched and only prompt the operator with those suspicious cases has not been addressed in the prior art.